Tag Archives | Rioting

Atlantic Cities describes the 8-bit-style smartphone game RIOT, a thought-provoking attempt to capture the liminal state which occurs during uprisings when order breaks down. I'd rather have my kids playing this than a game which makes them Navy SEALs:

"Riot" is a developing project in Italy that's led by film-and-game director Leonard Menchiari, who previously did cinematography for "Half-Life" creator Valve Corporation. The atmospheric little simulator of bedlam, which runs on iOS or Android phones, is inspired by real-life political turmoil from around the globe.
There's a hefty element of strategy involved, with the player taking on either the role of the agitators or the truncheoned legions of police trying to maintain order.
The developers have received modest funding so far on their Indiegogo page. If they collect enough cash, they hope to enrich the simulator by traveling to the sites of recent uprisings in Greece, Egypt and Italy to interview people involved in the conflicts.

The mob of skateboarders and skate fans who ran amok through Hollywood on Saturday night, captured on a YouTube video by a driver caught in the middle of the mayhem, garnered national attention just as it attracted a swift crackdown by riot police.
Skaters were seen vandalizing businesses and throwing bottles, while bystanders are seen running — resulting in the deployment of more than 100 Los Angeles police officers in riot gear...

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff explains why limiting access to social networks is not the answer to preventing riots, for CNN:

In the past, people seemed to require a massive “cue” to form a mob. The New York blackouts of the summer of 1977 resulted in citywide looting, not just because alarm systems were down, but because a whole lot of hot, angry, frustrated people had an excuse to act en masse. Likewise, the verdict on the Rodney King trial served as a spark, synchronizing simultaneous explosions of mob behavior in a dozen North American cities.

Media can certainly accelerate or even reproduce this process. Radio gave Hitler a way to unify angry crowds as never before, and it both inspired and facilitated the chasing down and murder of about 800,000 Tutsis by gangs with machetes in Rwanda. Radio broadcasters announced where potential victims were hiding, coordinating the violence via media.

Sir, The August 17 commentaries by Richard Florida (“The inchoate rage beneath our global cities”) and John Kay (“Why the rioters should be reading Rousseau”), as well as the excellent Financial Times series on “The Squeezed Middle”, are all making important observations about a similar social, economic and political factor — inequality. Inequality is a fact of human societies built on hierarchies. We come to accommodate ourselves to different levels of inequality, as long as we feel that our society, overall, is at some level just.

In a recent academic work, “A Cultural Theory of International Relations”, Richard Ned Lebow goes back to ancient Greek thought on human motivations and argues that we need to reintegrate their notion of spirit into our understanding of human behaviour. The Greeks argued that humans are motivated by both appetite (the pursuit of material goods), as well as spirit (self-esteem, respect).

This photo has been making waves since it was uploaded to Twitter, supposedly depicting a man stripping off his clothes under the threat of violence from the man at right during the recent civil disturbances in Britain (this scene reportedly from Birmingham).

Is it what it seems or is it intentionally misleading in a clumsy attempt to spark race-related violence?

Click through to this breaking story from the Daily Mail for some scenes reminiscent of the ’70s and ’80s that inspired the Clash to write their classic London’s Burning:

Police came under attack from petrol bombs hurled by rioting mobs in North London last night as hundreds took to the streets following the shooting of a man by Scotland Yard marksmen.

Patrol cars, a shop and a double-decker bus were set ablaze and there were reports of looting amid scenes reminiscent of the violent unrest in the same area 26 years ago when PC Keith Blakelock was hacked to death.

Last night the Tottenham area erupted once again as more than 100 officers and specialist riot police faced crowds of more than 500 people protesting about the death of Mark Duggan, who lived on the estate and was described last week by police sources as a ‘gangster’.

There was concern that the disturbances were fanned by Twitter, with some of those taking part posting inflammatory comments from the scene and calling for reinforcements.

I’ve worked on a few daily papers over the last five years, but I’ve never before written or edited the phrase “the dead officer is understood to have been disemboweled.”

That was one of the early reports from the riot that knocked the head off Jakarta yesterday. A few hundred protestors who were convinced that the city was out to demolish a sacred tomb near Koja port in Tanjung Priok assembled at about 6 AM to stand guard against 2,000 or so public order officers (a security force kind of like police, but who work for a different city administration) who poured into the area, accompanied by two excavators.

It’s not clear which side swung the first club, but by 7ish the scene was a full-fledged battle. Protestors came prepared with machetes and sickles, which they used on the officers and later the cops with total abandon.